


solace at your door

by Meridas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Everyone Takes Care of Molly and Loves Him Very Much, Flowers, Fluff, Genderfluid Mollymauk Tealeaf, Mighty Nein Family Feels, Mollymauk Lives Fest, Other, Pre-Relationship, Sickfic, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 21:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meridas/pseuds/Meridas
Summary: Molly hates being sick. The Mighty Nein have something to cheer him up.





	solace at your door

\---- _Daffodils_ \----

“ _Shh_ , you’re going wake him up!”

“Well then move all your shit, Caleb, I just want to put these on the table here where he can see them!”

“ _Ja_ , okay, please be _careful_ with that—!”

Molly cracks his eyes open. The room swims into focus, blessedly dim. His head is still pounding and his throat hurts when he swallows. Damn it. He was hoping a nap would fix everything but apparently he’s actually sick. He groans pitifully and mashes his face into his pillow.

The bickering voices stop. Molly raises his head and squints at them from his blanket nest.

Caleb and Jester are caught in some odd tableau, both of them looking over at him. Caleb is scrambling to hold onto several books and scrolls that Jester seems to have been shoving into his arms, while in her other hand she’s holding… a vase?

“What?” Molly croaks. Oh, he sounds awful. He _hates_ being sick.

“Hi, Molly,” Jester croons. She sweeps a broken pencil and a few pieces of paper off his bedside table and sets the vase down. In the dim glow of one single Dancing Light, Molly can make out big white starburst flowers with cheery, bell-like orange centers. “I found some flowers that I thought might cheer you up because you’re sick! My mom would always bring me flowers when I was sick and I don’t know any spells to cure a cold, sorry. But these are daffodils, aren’t they pretty? They grow all over the place around here!”

“All over the place where people plant them in their gardens,” Caleb says under his breath. A pencil drops from his clutches.

Molly smiles at Jester. “Did you climb somebody’s fence to get me flowers?” he asks as brightly as he can manage.

Jester shrugs. “They don’t even have fences around them up in the TriSpire, so really if they don’t mean for people to take flowers they should really look into getting some, maybe.”

Molly chuckles, except that hurts his throat so he stops and just grins at Jester. “Thank you, dear,” he manages. “I quite like them.”

\---- _Hyacinths_ \----

He thinks that’s surely the last of the flowers, but he’s wrong. Next time he wakes up, coughing and hacking his way out of sleep, it’s to see Nott’s glowing yellow eyes leering at him in the pre-dawn darkness.

He coughs at her.

Nott wrinkles her nose. “I guess you’re not feeling better, then.”

Molly groans. “Not at all,” he rasps. He wrinkles his nose. “Water?” he asks hopefully.

“Um…” Nott hesitates. “Well, I have water, but I actually—well, I’m using it already!”

Molly narrows his eyes at her. “How are you _using it_?”

Nott sighs and holds up a jar full of water. Water and flowers, apparently. They’re lovely, thick green stems covered in smaller blossoms in white and pink.

“Jester gave me the idea,” Nott says hopefully, “since you know, you’re sick, and apparently you get flowers for sick people? I don’t know, I just thought they smell nice and Yasha says you’d like the colors, too!”

Molly tries to sniff experimentally. His nose makes a horrible noise and he can’t breathe.

“Okay, you can’t smell them, but they still look really nice!” Nott says. She holds them out to him.

She’s decorated the top of the jar with a bracelet of sparkly beads. Molly smiles and takes it from her.

\---- _Iris_ \----

“I got these for you,” Yasha says softly, placing two cups of tea and a new vase on Molly’s bedside table.

Molly’s sitting up now, no longer napping the whole day away, but still confined to bed with a fever. He extends one hand from his blanket nest for the tea, eyeing the new flowers curiously.

“They’re pretty,” he says, and he loves all the flowers his friends have brought him but these might be his favorites so far. They have deep purple petals draping away from light lilac centers and bright yellow hearts. “Did you take any for your book?”

Yasha nods happily. “It’s so early in the year, I didn’t think there would be this many flowers here. But I like them. It’s nice to see all this color in the city.”

She sits down and leans back against the mountain of pillows behind Molly. He leans into her immediately. She puts her arm around him, patting vaguely at his blanket-covered shape.

They sit there together, sipping their tea and looking at the growing riot of color in Molly’s room.

\---- _Crocus_ \----

Fjord ends up being the one who stops by every day to change the water in the vases and pull away the old, fading blooms. He’s usually in and out very quietly, but one day Molly stumbles back into his room to find a small teacup on the windowsill, bursting with small cup-shaped flowers. They’re just little, each of them about the size of Molly’s little finger, but he likes how they look next to the vase of Yasha’s tall purple irises and Nott’s sparkly jar of hyacinths. Jester has replaced the gangly white-orange daffodils so that the bundle is as fresh as ever.

\---- _Candytuft_ \----

Beau eventually brings him a handful she clearly gathered up from somebody’s hedge, but they’re cute. She obviously hasn’t thought it through, either, because then she glances around for a place to put them and can’t find a single thing that isn’t already bursting with random flora.

Molly lets her sweat, a grin widening on his face. Beau catches his expression and flips him off. She loses one of the flowers.

Molly bursts into a laugh that becomes a hacking cough. “You are priceless,” he wheezes, “you absolute _disaster_.”

“I was trying to be nice!” Beau exclaims. “Okay! Everyone else is bringing you fucking flowers because you’re all gross and sick and I just passed some and I grabbed ‘em for you, alright?” She thrusts them into his face, almost punching him in his stuffed-up nose. “I’m not bringing you a thing to put them in now, asshole, I’m gonna go get a cup and put _beer_ in it and _drink it_ instead.”

Molly barely catches the handful of little white flowers in both hands. They’re small and kind of tangled up, with twisty dark green stems and little clusters of tiny, round white petals.

He grins down at the little bunch of flowers. They may be ragged, and it may have been spur-of-the-moment, but Beau passed some flowers and thought of him.

\---- _Tulips_ \----

Finally, after four days of bedridden misery, Molly flounces downstairs into the tavern and joins the group. His hair is damp from the inn’s bathing services – paltry, and he still wants a proper bathhouse – and he no longer feels coated in fever sweat, which feels like a thing worth celebrating.

Suddenly the tavern door swings open and there’s Caleb, rain-spattered and out of breath. He sees Molly with the group and stops, then jerks one hand behind his back.

“Oh! Molly, you are feeling better then?” he asks. It’s not anywhere near smooth, and Molly raises an eyebrow at him.

“I am,” he says, slowly leaning back in his chair. “What has you in such a hurry there, Mr. Caleb?”

A pretty red blush creeps up Caleb’s face. He clears his throat, eyes darting around their table where the entire group sits watching him now. “It, ah…” Then he straightens up and seems to come to a decision.

He strides over to Molly, who perks up at attention. Caleb hardly ever looks so determined in social situations, let alone when there are no books involved. He stops in front of Molly’s chair and whips his hand out from behind his back.

Molly blinks. Caleb is offering him a circlet, by the looks of it, but it’s all—

“Caleb,” he says slowly, a delighted grin spreading across his face. “Did you go and find me a _flower crown_?”

Caleb’s blush isn’t fading. Molly loves it. “There was a child selling them,” he mutters, “and it seemed like the kind of thing that would cheer you up.”

Molly beams up at him. He’s right, of course. The crown is made of bright, fresh red tulips, waxy and cool to the touch. He takes it eagerly from Caleb’s hands and settles it on his head. “How do I look?”

Caleb reaches out to tweak the flowers into place. There’s a tiny smile trying to curl at the edges of his lips, blooming warmth in his blue eyes.

“I think you look like a dork,” Beau calls out across the table.

The little bubble between them is broken, and Molly immediately turns to stick his tongue out at Beau. She flips him off in return.

“I think it’s cute,” Yasha says loyally, and Jester nods emphatically. The conversation derails into more talk about other flowers Jester has found around town, which leads her and Nott to discussing the unguarded state of TriSpires gardens in alarmingly cavalier tones. Molly wraps his hands back around his mug, and feels a fleeting touch along his back.

“You look lovely, Mollymauk,” Caleb murmurs in his ear, and then he’s moving away, off to the bar before Molly can see if he’s blushing.

Molly hides his own blush in his drink and turns back to the conversation, smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> My super late submission for Day 3 of the Mollymauk Lives Fest! Don't read into these flower meanings here, they're all just flowers that bloom around the same time of year in the Pacific Northwest, and I imagine that Zadash has similar seasons. Red tulips happen to be romantic, what a coincidence... 
> 
> Thank you again so much to the Mollymauk Lives Fest organizer for making this event happen! It's been absolutely wonderful. 
> 
> Title comes from "Warmth" by Bastille.


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